Aussie here. My mate and I Traveled with a young American chap from Texas through Europe in 1979. He told us his name was Barbie. We thought it a bit odd; but, you know - OK 🤷🏻‍♀️. About two weeks in staying at Youth Hostels & traveling on our Euro Pass, we eventually had to show our passport at some border crossing. Barbie opened up his passport and the Guard read out his name & asked him to verify it. "Robert Smith" My friend & I looked at each other and screamed with laughter. He was totally mystified (as was the guard just quietly) We said incredulously, your name is actually Robert? As in Bobby from Robert? "Well, yeah, Barbie from Robert". We had bloody introduced him to other Aussie, Kiwis & Poms as Barbie (and they'd all done the WTH 😵‍💫look) OMG we laughed. Good ol' Robert, he thought we were insane. 😂😂😂

@dielaughing73

6 ай бұрын

Haha my first time in NYC I struggled to get an American to understand his own name. I was saying "Arty, Arty, Arty!!" and eventually spelled it out to him "A R T I E" and he said "oh, Arrrrrrdy, that's me"

@barrysteven5964

6 ай бұрын

My granddaughter loves watching the Frozen films. We are English. In case you don't know, the two main characters in the film are called Elsa and Anna. For some reason the Americans pronounce Anna with a long vowel at the beginning. My granddaughter is convinced her name is Arna and pronounces it that way.

@Showsni

6 ай бұрын

@@barrysteven5964Huh. I always thought they were trying to give Anna a foreign sounding pronunciation that might be how they say it in Arendelle. You think that's just how Americans say Anna?

@jeremydavis3631

6 ай бұрын

As an American, I'll say that it was definitely intended to sound foreign. We do use that pronunciation sometimes, but rarely for Americans named Anna. The more common pronunciation is /'æ-nə/, as you'd probably expect.

@CubicSpline7713

6 ай бұрын

Also an Aussie. Also did Europe on a Euro Pass. Also 1979. We may have bumped shoulders at some point!

I remember when I was with an American high school group on a trip through Europe. During a bus trip through the Alps, I was chatting with a classmate behind me, and she was speaking in a fake British accent. To make a long story short, she rated her accent as "authentic." I didn't believe her, but I didn't know any better, so I didn't argue against it. Once we got to England and began talking to British people, my group and I could tell that our attempts in even imitating a British accent were glaringly laughworthy. Ever since that trip, I have wondered why we Americans don't quite get the British accent. Your pointing out the examples of long and short vowels, along with examples from American actors, helped me see, or hear, what my classmate was getting wrong. So, thank you for clearing that up for me.

@Croyles

6 ай бұрын

​@@aureissimusthe most American comment, ladies and gentlemen.

@xander1052

6 ай бұрын

@@aureissimus Americans and Canadians do not outnumber the rest of the english speaking world, in fact the rest outnumber you by a monumental margin, thanks to the lovely people of India. Also never heard any of those 3 actors doing British accents, but I have heard of one British Actor fooling an American producer with his American accent so well he thought he was American until he met him in person (and this producer was against hiring a non american as he didn't believe they could do a convincing american accent) The british actor in question was of course Hugh Laurie, who in real life sounds about as British as having an argument on what a single serving baked bread good is called.

@biosparkles9442

6 ай бұрын

@@Croyles the irony of them saying that Americans don't care about doing authentic British accents, but then naming 3 Americans who apparently did convincingly authentic British accents, is remarkable

@gabrielleangelica1977

6 ай бұрын

Brits don't get our accents perfectly either!

@gabrielleangelica1977

6 ай бұрын

​@@aureissimusYou tell em! 🤠

That reversed "jɪp" was so simple yet ingenious! And my accent says "lawn order" for law & order 😂

@niruyt6103

6 ай бұрын

Loved it, too!

@YindiOfficial

6 ай бұрын

"lawn order" is killing me 💀

@klondike3112

6 ай бұрын

@@YindiOfficial What can I say, us Americans love our lawns...

@charleslippert2021

6 ай бұрын

OMG! You've beat me to the "Lawn Order".

@captainyulef5845

6 ай бұрын

From the midwest of America, and I pronounce it exactly like this lol

I'm no expert in British accents but "you cut my heh" absolutely murdered me

@baldyhead

6 ай бұрын

If she was trying to do a British midlands accent (or possibly anywhere north of this) she'd be saying "you cut me yeah!"

@madmikehooper

3 ай бұрын

You maybe mean 'coot me yeah' ? 'cut me yeah' is more cockney London, "in me 'onist a'pinyon"!@@baldyhead

Any classically trained singer will confirm this glide off from a vowel for you. It's one of the big difficulties English speakers run into when learning to sing in languages that do have pure vowels. Without a lot of practice, English speakers really want to glide off the vowel.

@turkeypedal

6 ай бұрын

As a classically trained singer, I agree and disagree. Some vowels always have offglides in English. But not the ones he brings up in this video. They can have offglides, but I was specifically taught not to use them when singing bel canto style, (i.e. "classically") even when singing in English. My normal accent actually uses a lot more diphthongs than standard American English. So our teachers were more conscious of this.

@allanjmcpherson

6 ай бұрын

@@turkeypedal I'm not sure I follow you. He shows the offglides occurring in English in the video. My teachers always stressed natural pronunciation, so I would include the offglides in English, but I suppose that's a matter of taste. Anyway, my point was about other languages. I can assure you that my students have to work hard to achieve a pure o and u in Italian, for example. We all agree there are no offglides in Italian.

@victorcelna3028

6 ай бұрын

​@@turkeypedalI do know what a diphthong is, it's that kwah-fy you have with a cigarette. I have no idea what a glide off is.

@kilianhekhuis

5 ай бұрын

@@victorcelna3028 Well, there's an off-glide, but I think that in general is not part of the "pure" pronunciation of a sound?

@wonderstruck.

5 ай бұрын

When Koreans mock American accents, we exaggerate the glides in our vowels. 안녕하세요 (an-nyeong-ha-se-yo), or hello, becomes “an-nyeowng-ha-sei-yow” 😂

Regarding the 'broad transcription' excuse, I can confirm that many Chinese students diligently learn the traditional symbols under the impression that they are an accurate representation of the sounds they need to produce. And many of them produce these symbols if you try to teach them anything different. Sadly, a few even (understandably!) choose to believe what they learned in school and see in every dictionary and pronunciation manual they've ever used over some random teacher online. However, surely nothing is more counterproductive than calling certain diphthongs "long vowels". I don't think I've ever felt more frustrated than when correcting online homework and giving the feedback that students aren't making a distinction between, say, "ship" and "sheep" and then hearing them dutifully come back with "sheep" and "sheeeeeeeep" because a teacher or parent had explained that one is a short vowel and the other is a long vowel.

@9zeromine

6 ай бұрын

Hi, can you explain how your example of "sheep" and "sheeeeeeeep" is incorrect? Are they no such things as short and long vowel sounds? Genuinely curious. I'm a native English speaker but don't know really know about things like 'diphthongs' and such. Thanks

@ananimal9779

6 ай бұрын

​@@9zeromine"sheep" is not the word "ship" and "sheeeeeeep" is not the word "sheep", therefore they were incorrect. The students were learning that the only differences between those two words are the length of the "ee" sound, not that "ship" has an entirely different vowel sound instead.

@9zeromine

6 ай бұрын

@@ananimal9779oh okay that makes sense, thanks for clarifying

@martinhartecfc

6 ай бұрын

@@9zeromine Depending on your dialect, there are such things. However, it wasn't what I was referring to. Traditionally, certain diphthongs are referred to as long vowels. For example, the diphthong in "go" is called "long O" while the diphthong in "now" is correctly called a diphthong. It's all a bit of a weird conflation of spelling and pronunciation rules all mixed up in an unhelpful way, but students learn this in phonics classes. The reason is probably because phonics was originally designed to teach first language students how to read.

@zak3744

6 ай бұрын

​@@9zeromine Different accents in English have slightly different vowels, but whatever the vowels an accent has, they basically split into three over-arching categories: short vowels, non-short monophthongs and diphthongs. In my own accent, an example of a short vowel would be the "e" in bed, a non-short monophthong would be the "a" in father, and a diphthong would be the "a" in face. A short vowel is one that has a short, explosive, stabby quality to it. It is an instantaneous sound, a puff of air and if you try and artificially extend to make it a longer sound it feels weird (you have to consciously put more air in after that instantaneous "hit"), and it sounds weird and turns into something else phonemically. An example in my own speech is that the my short vowel in "bid" has the same sound as my vowel in "beard" (people have different sounds for the vowel in "beard", but my particular one is very flat and constant), so that if I try to artificially make the vowel sound in "bid" longer, to sustain it unnaturally, the word turns into the word "beard"! A non-short monophthong is a vowel that isn't short and you can hold it for as long as you like, stretching it out. It also stays the same sound all the way through, it's a "flat" vowel, holding the sound constant. A diphthong is the name for a vowel that doesn't stay in the same place. Maybe diphthong is an unhelpful word because it suggests there must be two distinct parts to it, a kind of step between two vowels. Really, it's more like it goes for a walk, it's a gliding vowel. Obviously it has to be a bit longer than a short vowel: if a short vowel is just a single punch of sound, it doesn't have time to wander around anywhere! Now, some accents, notably North American Englishes, might not have a phonemic distinction of short vowels. But they will still have the categories of monophthongs and diphthongs (stationary vowels and sliding vowels) which are different "types" of vowel. So the problem with "sheep" & "sheeeeeeep" instead of "ship" & "sheep" is that it doesn't address any of the actual characteristics that differentiate those two vowels into fundamentally different types of vowel. It doesn't give phonemic shortness (i.e. that instantaneous, staccato, punchiness) to "ship" and it doesn't add any gliding movement into "sheep". It merely tinkers with the duration. It's the stabbiness and the sliding around that make the "ship" and "sheep" vowels respectively the types of vowels that they are, a short vowel and a diphthong. (for accents without short vowels, it's obviously just "no sliding around" versus "sliding around" that distinguishes them as different classes of vowel, but that distinction is still missing!)

English teacher here working and living in Guadalajara, Mexico. I can't tell you how much your videos have helped me teach and understand my own pronunciation, as well as that of other dialects. You can probably imagine my endless frustration when my supervisors decided to reprimand me for not adhering to the incorrect vowel symbols in every textbook I'm, given, or for telling my students that my dialect is different from that which the book is using and so I would not say certain things the way the book does, or for clarifying that no one pronunciation is objectively universally "correct," and explain that what I mean by "correct" or "incorrect" in terms of pronunciation and grammar should only be understood to basically mean "to my knowledge understandable to the majority of English-speakers" and "to my knowledge NOT understandable to the majority of English-speakers," respectively. I actually almost got fired over it, as they accused me of simply telling the students the books and other teachers who would tout the "correctness" of the forms they taught based on an unaware assumption of the superiority of their own dialect were simply wrong. They even said that in order to be a good English teacher, I must strictly adhere to explaining correctness through prescriptivism rather than even mention the descriptivist reality of language study at all! (needless to say, those supervisors are not linguists or even good English teachers themselves) Thank goodness my students rallied to my defense and insisted that I was the best teacher they'd ever had (I take this more as a condemnation of other teachers' explanations than praise of my own, but that obviously warmed my heart), and that I was (sadly) the first one who'd actually bothered to explain the discrepancies they'd been confused by as a result of running into contradictions between different books and incongruity between what they claimed and what the students personally observed, all of which went unchecked, often for years, due to lazy, arrogant teachers who never bothered to seriously study any of these sorts of things for themselves despite years of being educators on these subjects! It's beyond a shame that, at least in all the schools I've worked for, no more than 2-5% of the staff so much as bother to question the borderline gibberish they misinform paying students with every day. Your channel is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and I've recommended it more times than I can count. Bless you, Dr. Lindsey!

@YujiUedaFan

6 ай бұрын

Ignorant teacher: You must teach these students using an American accent!

@DrunkenHotei

6 ай бұрын

@@YujiUedaFan Ignorant teacher continued: "No, not THAT American accent! The one my elementary school teachers said was correct!"

@YujiUedaFan

6 ай бұрын

@@DrunkenHotei Smart teacher: Ah, so the one that doesn't exist.

@nono7105

6 ай бұрын

You're right, no one pronunciation is universally correct. Except Australian, of course. We can all recognise that Australian is, objectively, the right pronunciation. But apart from that, no universally correct pronunciation.

@trueaussie9230

6 ай бұрын

​@@nono7105 Too bloody right, mate. 👍👍👍

Video request: It would be really interesting to see a video on how native English speakers get other languages wrong because they add the unwritten sounds we have at the end of our vowels. Like putting w on the end of Spanish "Ricardo", j on the end of German "sie" etc. We don't know we're erroneously adding those sounds when we speak a foreign language - because we don't even know we're adding those sounds in English! The lesson is that it's hard to pronounce a foreign language properly when you don't realise how you're pronouncing your own.

@Allan_son

6 ай бұрын

Consonants too. I think he did do one one that.

@CareyEvans

6 ай бұрын

Related to this, I now understand why I can’t hear the й at the end of мій, for example, when trying to learn Ukrainian.

@jamesdewane1642

6 ай бұрын

Yep. Offglides for sure make gringos sound foreign when they speak Spanish. Coming back the other way, Spanish speakers will offglide pretty accurately for know, but less easily for no, because sounds are supposed to be written, carajo! No problem on though, but they really distrust me when I ask them for the offglide in home or hope.

@carvoloco4229

6 ай бұрын

As a native Spanish speaker, we're most often taught that Spanish sounds as it is written. But that couldn't be farther from the truth! For example, there are two different b and d sounds (one hard and one soft each) in bebe (drink) and dado (die).

@melopuss375

6 ай бұрын

Especially glaring when an english speaker attempts to speak japanese, which is composed of almost entirely short cut-off vowels. They just glide all over the place adding sounds that aren't there.

As an Aussie, I struggled so much when teachers told me to "sound out the words to figure out the spelling", I was adding extra Rs, Js and Ws in so many places! It's good to know I wasn't imagining them! Sometimes they are part of the vowel sounds and sometimes people just add them in! It was extra confusing when I was so exposed to both British and American accents that had so many differences in the way things are pronounced!!

@lilpetz500

6 ай бұрын

Right? I was teaching some literacy classes as a personal tutor for a few kids in my area, and we'd have an extra point with many words of explaining how some don't technically have silent letters, but emphasis on them is common for different accents to ours. And I'd try openly teach them different valid pronunciations of words to try emphasis the presence and influence of accent, as realistically we do grow up with different spoken accents around us. I hope I made the complexity of it clear for them though.

@pabloapostar7275

6 ай бұрын

This "sound it out" advice was the worst. They didn't bother to mention that the spellings are 400 years old for most of the old English words, while other words in current English were spelled with a Latin alphabet, as well as a lot of words being French and spelled using a French alphabet. And after all of that, English has a smattering of words from a bunch of languages spelled using different alphabets. My joke about this is to "sound out" Stephen as step hen.

@stevewandel9317

6 ай бұрын

I've been trying a bit of this with my 6 year old, but my Australian accent with his mother's Chinese accent and lots of youtube watching with mostly US accent mean it's kind of a battle...

@adamcetinkent

6 ай бұрын

​@@pabloapostar7275The hell is a French alphabet?

@pabloapostar7275

6 ай бұрын

​@@adamcetinkent I'm not referring to the graphic characters (the letters) in each alphabet. I'm referring to the alphabet as being how a language associates sounds with letters. The way the French pronounce a, b, c, d, ... is different than how the English pronounce a, b, c, d, .... The words/sounds in each language are then spelled based on those pronunciations. So it's possible to spell differently a word/sound spoken the same in two languages solely due the different sounds associated with each languages' alphabets. Vice versa: the Buffalo Sabres had a player whose nameplate was "Satan." That name is pronounced differently in his European language than it is English.

In American primary schools, phonics lessons teach that "long" and "short" are the names of the different vowel sounds, not an actual difference in length. So, for Americans, our short/long vowel pairs are ae/ei, eh/ee, ih/ai, ah/oh, and uh/oo. Along with the statistically incorrect i-before-e rule, we are taught to just remember which words have the A sounding like a short O. Thank you for the perspective on vowel length actually being a measure of a vowel's length; this is a genuinely foreign idea to most Americans. As an aspiring voice actor who does a lot of character and accent work, this has already transformed how I think about vowels independent of articulation. As a related aside: when the US military taught me the NATO phonetic alphabet, I noticed some of the words were slightly different than how I normally say them, such as Lima (like the city, not the bean) and Quebec (KAY-beck instead of kwuh-BECK); these made sense because I know that's how those words are pronounced in Peru and Canada, respectively, and this alphabet was used by more than just Americans. When it came to the numbers, I understood why 9 was "niner", as would anyone who has tried to relay a phone number over a bad connection. But there was one weirdness that never quite made sense to me, until 26 years later. Why was 4 pronounced "fo-wer" instead of "for"? I now understand that it's to make sure Americans give enough length to the vowel so that it's easier for British operators to hear, and for them to add a tiny bit of W articulation so that we don't confuse it with Oh or Golf (possible with some accents). It's amazing how something like this can have such an effect far outside of the realm of linguistics.

@andrewdunbar828

6 ай бұрын

We had the same in Australia. But that's not linguistics, it's English class. The two have very confusing terminology overlaps unfortunately.

@HDJess

6 ай бұрын

Interesting story. I work in aviation and I've never heard anyone say "kay-beck" or "fo-wer". Maybe that's just an American thing and not present internationally. It's true that we say "niner" instead of nine. There's one more deviation you forgot to mention, I'd guess you use it too: "tree" instead of three.

@sabinrawr

6 ай бұрын

@@HDJess My reference was the NATO phonetic alphabet, which is really only valid in the militaries of NATO countries (and maybe some of the paramilitary organizations within, such as police). International flights aren't limited to NATO countries, so that makes sense. I've never I used Tree, though. I've said it as a Yooper word (from the upper peninsula of Michigan), "Yeah, I'll take two 'r tree o' them there thigamajiggers, thanks". I can certainly see that Spanish and French pilots might say it that way, given that Spanish doesn't have a TH (þ or ð) sound and in French it's just a T or Tʰ. I also know that American poker dealers often refer to 3-cards as "trey", not sure if that's related.

@Australianchessplayer

6 ай бұрын

@@sabinrawr Quebec is French, and Qu is pronounced as the English K. Tres is French for three and pronounced trey. I'd never thought about it before, but that seems probable to me. The E in tres wears a hat, I can't do it on my US English keyboard.

@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410

6 ай бұрын

@@sabinrawr trey is actually a distinct word in English, along with ace, deuce, cater, cinque, and sice (though cater, cinque, and sice are largely no longer used). English loaned these from Norman French back in the middle ages and they've since taken on specific meanings, in this case for cards and dice.

im slowly becoming more and more convinced that sentence-mixing (using audio editing to assemble new phrases out of voice recordings- a tactic of the "KZread Poop" medium of editing videos to make them funny via absurdity (in my opinion, the most silly-driven art form

@robinrehlinghaus1944

6 ай бұрын

poop

@caramelldansen2204

6 ай бұрын

YTP heads rise up!

@notwithouttext

6 ай бұрын

when a word makes an oo sound, oo sound, uwuwuwuwuwu sound

@omegasmileyface

6 ай бұрын

poopers unite

@mustbegross

6 ай бұрын

UwU

Intrusive R can be found in America too! I suddenly realized this when my Massachusetts Grandmother said "I saw rit." It makes sense that in New England English, where non-rhoticity is common, intrusive R would also appear. I never noticed this when growing up, only when I was more aware of these features through linguistics.

@dfpguitar

6 ай бұрын

It's funny to hear some people say "I saw it over.." as they give you two very strong intrusive Rs in a row. I may even do it myself at times, but when speaking in natural flow it's hard to notice them being there.

@ScottJB

6 ай бұрын

"Warsh" for "wash" in some parts of the Eastern US as well, even in already rhotic accents.

@stevecarter8810

6 ай бұрын

As a Brit visiting Boston, I read that the non nonrhoticity was a challenge to imitate especially with the intrusive r. After reading a while, I realised the rules are basically describing the way the English do it. Additional tidbit: my wife's family is from hull, England, (there's a hull, MA too!) And her family uses no intrusive r in "saw it" but pronounces the w instead with a weird, but arguably correct, result

@Sgt.chickens

6 ай бұрын

Many parts of the more rural US still use words phrases and have accents that more directly descend from certain regions of europe mostly parts of the UK. In older times post slavery. A lot of southern slang and Black american slang came from the parts of england from which white southerners migrated. In which parts they even used to be known as Redknecks and hicks etc. Some words such as Chitlands for pig entrails and so on carried on for generations longer in the south and in black america than they did in the UK

@anndeecosita3586

6 ай бұрын

@@Sgt.chickensFYI The word is chitterlings but most Southerners and black people with Southern roots usually say chitlins.

I love the twinkle Geoff always has in his eye when teaching us about accents. Another great video.

4:30 I learned this a long time ago, funnily enough because of the voice recording feature on my 3DS, where I could play what I had recorded backwards, and what I often did was try to mimic as closely as possible, what a word sounded like in reverse. I noticed that "ee" sounds in particular sounded the same as "yih" sounds, and later realised that it was the same tongue placement. Glad to hear someone talk about it. Your channel is a wonderful resource that I'm glad I found.

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Thank you so much. In the modern world, people who edit real speech (like video creators) know more about phonetics than the old school 'phoneticians' who just peddle the myths they were taught.

Omg it's Matt Parker 😮

These videos show the English language as a much more complicated subject than any teacher would teach you in school. Also, learning how the language has evolved is something that is fascinating. My wife is Bulgarian, but she was taught American English and so are many of her friends; one of her friends moved to the UK and the children speak with a British accent even when speaking in Bulgarian. This is why I find languages, in general, fascinating!

@huskytail

6 ай бұрын

Strange, the books used in the official English language high-schools program in Bulgaria were in British English. All the words we studied came with British English API. Actually, even outside of the language high-schools, the books and exercises were using British English examples. I am very curious where she studied.

@rubberduckyjr8527

6 ай бұрын

@@huskytail Could be American College. But I agree that pretty much everywhere else British English is the default

@huskytail

6 ай бұрын

@@rubberduckyjr8527 very probable, yes. I couldn't think about another place where they would learn American English or maybe some private schools. I studied in one for a year and they used a mishmash of everything.

As a French man trying to perfect his English pronunciation and wants to have a southern English accent, this video is invaluable, thank you very much EDIT: some people seem to misunderstand: 1) I'm not trying to hide my French accent, I'm trying to change from an American accent to a British one because I think it sounds nicer 2) my main reason for working on and correcting my accent is because I enjoy doing so, not because I'm ashamed of anything

@robbybobbyhobbies

6 ай бұрын

I'm doing the opposite - are there any French resources that i should consult to perfect my (appalling) French accent?

@edbee8508

6 ай бұрын

@@robbybobbyhobbies try and replicate French people speaking English, and that's kinda how your mouth and tongue should be behaving. Then switch to French while being conscious of that.

@robbybobbyhobbies

6 ай бұрын

@@edbee8508 interesting, thanks.

@ek-nz

6 ай бұрын

Am I right in thinking the first step is kind of to push everything forward in the mouth to do French? There seems to be a lot happening on the front half of the tongue.

@BenBenBenBenBenBenBenBenBenB3n

6 ай бұрын

@@ek-nz yep! Aside from velar plosives as well as our infamous R, French is an extremely frontal language, in both vowels and consonnants

Not the collaboration I was expecting, but it is a welcome one. Maths and language go together, who would have thunk. Great to see Matt Parker here!

@PC_Simo

6 ай бұрын

I couldn’t have worded it better, myself. 🎯👍🏻

Yay! More Australian! Nice that the South African English accent got a mention too. Love the fact that you are starting to use more examples from other English accents than just the "American v British" binary.

@footballsoccerx2021

6 ай бұрын

People nearly always forget that the many of the Caribbean islands are English speaking countries, too. Places like Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, St Lucia, Grenada among others. There are 19 majority native English speaking countries in the world. South Africa and India are NOT included in that list.

@shonawest276

6 ай бұрын

Not British: Southern English

@pauldobson2529

5 ай бұрын

Except that there are about 50 distinct English accents. There are considered to be 3 Australian accents in a country many, many times bigger than England, and one of those three is probably an attempt to sound more English. Manchester and Liverpool are about 25 miles apart and very different accents.

@LunizIsGlacey

5 ай бұрын

@@pauldobson2529 Still, more representation is better representation.

As an Aussie, when you said "allergic to hiatus" and then said banana ish - I almost died trying to say banana and ish without an R sound.

@stalar2892

6 ай бұрын

I paused the video and tried it. I unconsciously went with hard attack, but then when I sped it up I naturally said "bananarish". "banana ish" just sounded pretentious and slow 😆

@cclentz

2 ай бұрын

@@stalar2892 Interesting. I'm from southern Alberta, Canada. I can easily say banana-ish without hard attack but it seems I separate the two with an extremely slight sigh between the two that prevents the full glottal stop. Saying "a hour" is easier than "an hour". It might be because our English speaking in Alberta is influenced by Blackfoot/Cree with lots of skillful glottal stops.

This has finally explained to me why in my American primary school, the vowel sounds were broken into "long" and "short", even though the length of the vowel wasn't any different between the two. We must have borrowed the terms from UK English teaching without criticizing their validity in American English. I probably would have preferred hard/soft or stiff/relaxed to relate to what kind of pose your mouth needs to make to pronounce them.

@iykury

3 ай бұрын

i think "tense" and "lax" would be the linguistic terms?

@georgio101

Ай бұрын

No this isn't quite right. That classic terminology of Short vs. Long vowels in English education is based on how those vowels worked in Middle English. In Middle English 'mat' and 'mate' were differentiated by duration. Then the Great Vowel Shift mucked this up so they all differed in quality, not so much length. The length distinctions of Modern British accents being discussed in the video are a newer generation and different from these. Mat and Mate aren't distinguished on length in modern British accents, but (depending on the accent) Mat and Mart may be. Wok and Woke are differentiated by quality, but Wok and Walk may be differentiated by length. I think the Long A/short A terminology might be less common in British teaching, because it is even more confusing when the accent actually has length distinctions, but they're entirely different to the one used in the schema.

This was revolutionary for me, living in New Zealand, so teaching the New Zealand accent primarily which is close to Australian in many respects. Not only will I approach transitional /j/ and /w/ in a different way, but also I can teach vowel sound like /u:/ and /ɪː/ more as diphthongs. I think this will really help my learners expecially with that long /ɪː/ sound

@heathergarnham9555

6 ай бұрын

As an Aussie, I always hear a closer similarity between the Kiwi and the South African accents then the Australian

@fuckdefed

6 ай бұрын

@@heathergarnham9555I’ve long thought that the Kiwi accent sounds like a South African trying to sound Aussie, or perhaps an Aussie trying to sound South African. I’d still say that Kiwi is closer to Aussie than Seffie though

@bobsayshi7073

6 ай бұрын

@@heathergarnham9555As a South African I sometimes can’t even tell the difference between a mild NZ accent and an SA accent, hahaha

@heathergarnham9555

6 ай бұрын

@@bobsayshi7073 it's always fun to watch a rugby match between SA and NZ.

@gravyz2cute4u

6 ай бұрын

@@heathergarnham9555 Same. I have to listen really hard to distinguish between NZ and South African haha. For me, NZ is often easier to recognise, but South African sounds like a NZ accent but with weirder vowels >_

this whole video tickled me in all the right places. thank you for the upload, Dr Geoff, and in particular for taking apart the actors' accents. it's endlessly aggravating when one sees an American actor playing a Brit in a movie and people online are like "his accent was phenomenally good!" when actually people like us know & hear every last mistake...!

@JuandeFucaU

6 ай бұрын

Dick Van Dyke is still the best ever.

@biosparkles9442

6 ай бұрын

I'm yet to hear an American do a convincing Australian accent, though I have heard some American actors do very good British accents (with vocal coaching). I have no idea what it is about the Australian accent that is so difficult for Americans to mimic, maybe it's a combo of things.

@vintage0x

6 ай бұрын

@@biosparkles9442 look up "Brian Jordan Alvarez Australian accent" and tell me what you think of his

@saoirsedeltufo7436

6 ай бұрын

@@biosparkles9442 I'd guess that Americans have less exposure to Aussie accents compared to British ones? Also potentially that Americans don't often put on Aussie accents in the first place so a good one is even rarer

@ticketyboo2456

6 ай бұрын

​@@biosparkles9442please tell us the American actor who has done a convincing English accent...

Welsh is the same for avoiding hiatuses. For example, 'and' is 'a' in "ceffyl a gafr" (a horse and a goat) but 'ac' in "ceffyl ac arth" (a horse and a bear). The c in 'ac' separates the two vowels. Likewise 'the' is 'y' in "Y gaeaf" (winter) and 'yr' in "yr haf" (summer)

I'm not a linguist, but if I understand it correctly, in Polish hiatuses became the norm and linking is only a historical thing (mostly via elision or synaeresis). Using linking is usually sign of low status or poor education and in most cases is just a mistake. So whatever linking happened in the past is part of Polish, but any further linking is frozen and hiatuses are the only option now. And this video made me recall a situation from like 20-25 years ago, when I was learning English, and the teacher tried to explain us difference between 'an' and 'a' in English, and which is meant to used when. And one of my colleagues (he was then like 6-12 years old) was adamant that it is extremely stupid to use "an" instead of "a" and he could not understand how that additional /n/ is supposed help him in pronouncing anything. He even challenged the teacher that he is able to say "a apple" more clear and faster than the teacher is able to say "an apple". The teacher lost and resigned from trying to explain why the additional /n/ appears and just said "it is the way the English speakers speak, regardless if it makes any sense to you, they just avoid pronouncing two vowels next to each other". But it also means that foreign world with long vowels don't adapt well into Polish. For example name Aaron or Izaak will be usually pronounce as three syllables.

@LudwikTrammer

6 ай бұрын

As a Polish person, the 'a/an' distinction seems very similar to 'w/we' in Polish ('we' being the linking version of 'w' used before some consonants-w Ameryce, w Hiszpanii, we Wrocławiu, we Włoszech, we Francji). While I can technically use 'a' in place of 'an' ('a apple') or 'w' in place of 'we' ('w Francji'), in both cases, I would need to insert a stop between those words, which disrupts the flow of the sentence. So to me, the need for 'an' always seemed clear, even as a child.

@Hadar1991

6 ай бұрын

@@LudwikTrammer Never in my life I have said "we Francji" instead of "w Francji" and I would rather say "w Wroclawiu" than "we Wrocławiu". Only in "we Włoszech" is somewhat common occurrence. And w/we is confusing to many Poles, I heard a who was saying "we środę", because he did not understand when he should use "w" and when to use "we" and someone told him that "we" works with "środa" so he start using it that way. The w/we distinction is very confusing for me and probably from now on I will overthink each time should I use "w" or "we" to avoid mistake more, than existence of "we" will help pronounce me anything, thanks. xD

I am very impressed (each video anew) by Dr. Lindsey with his ability to explain clearly and concisely rather complicated linguistic features backed up by recent research. As a non-native English speaker, it's opened my eyes to many mistakes I make trying to mimic colloquial spoken speech. Please do continue with these wonderful lectures! On a different note, I think one of the subtle points made is that academic (well-established) knowledge doesn't permeate properly to the educational system. That's why those KZread channels present wrong facts (I don't doubt for a second their dedication and love for the English language). I'm a bit puzzled though by what you showed in professional books and dictionaries; the authors should've known better.

As a Hiberno-English speaker, growing up with exposure to British-English media, I often mistook those long-vowels + r-glide for a native r. The only examples I can think of right now are for *Chicargo and *Darlek (for Chicago and Dalek). These days, I am bombarded with totally inaccurate "Hiberno-English" text-to-speech engines (which I have to use in order to read and write), and it feels offensive. Especially as these voices make an absolute hash of pronouncing Irish names and placenames. Adding insult to injury, I can only correct these pronunciations using the 26-letter Latin alphabet with no real control over stresses. If they would only give me access to the IPA, I could come up with a much better pronunciation dictionary!

@kitchfacepalm

6 ай бұрын

Ha ha ha! 😂 I am a “Caledonian-English” speaker and I had exactly the same issue. I have tutored English for years and from my experience English children have exactly the same problem while learning to read and write. The speed with which my children cracked the spelling code compared with their perfectly intelligent English friends was staggering. An amusing example of the intrusive English R that my non native English speaking husband insists on pronouncing the plant named, bougainvillea as “buhrganvillia” as he first heard it from a southern English speaker. I had to actually show him that there is no r and that there is an oo sound not an uhr.

@MenelionFR

6 ай бұрын

What TTS's do you use? As a screen reader user and accessibility expert myself, I'm curious which ones do it wrong.

@johnradclyffehall

6 ай бұрын

Ha, I pronounced ‘lager’ as ‘larger’ in my own (irish) accent for years for this same reason - I’d only heard the word said aloud by english actors on television!

@coleenocasturme

6 ай бұрын

@@MenelionFR I think Nuance Vocaliser is the only engine with Irish-English voice "Moira". It's used both in JAWS and VoiceOver.

@coleenocasturme

6 ай бұрын

@@johnradclyffehall Yes, thank you - that's another one!

I grew up in California and in my elementary school we were taught about "long" and "short" vowels but it had nothing to do with vowel length. Instead we were taught that the long vowels were ā as in bake, ē as in keep, ī as in sigh, ō as in smoke, ū as in fluke; and short vowels were a as in back, e as in kept, i as in sit, o as in smock, u as in luck. All vowels the same length but different sounds. Much later when I learned about other languages such as Japanese having actual long and short vowels that seemed very novel and strange to me. I'd love to see your take on that.

@Allan_son

6 ай бұрын

Welcome to vowel shifts in English. As I understand it, Old English distinguished long and short vowels by length only. Fast forward a thousand years, and the original long and short are now different sounds.

@mehill00

6 ай бұрын

Yes, “long” and “short”, when used to describe vowels to this northeastern American are just arbitrary words to distinguish long-A {Kate = /Kāt/} from short-A {cat = /kat/}, long-E {bead = /bēd/} from short-E {bed = /bed/}, etc. Never knew that it might actually refer to duration of the utterance. (Forgive my pseudo-IPA, it’s probably wrong, but hopefully there are enough clues.)

@wardsdotnet

6 ай бұрын

@@mehill00 exactly and I wonder how they teach it to UK or Aussie kids

@Elizae274

6 ай бұрын

I’m Australian and I learnt the same thing - short a in cat, long a in Kate etc. I didn’t even know that my accent had actual phonemic length distinctions until I started getting into linguistics, they were always just completely different vowels that I never would have dreamed of grouping together

As a non-native English speaker whose accent at some point cemented to a more British sound to the point of not being able to do an American accent at all, this is really helpful for understanding what actually makes the difference. It turns out I actually can speak American if I follow these examples!

I never noticed the longer "four" in British speech. Fascinating.

I remember learning that vowels were long or short, and I'm Aussie. Its funny to me that our dictionary doesnt acknowledge them while our curriculum does.

@Australianchessplayer

6 ай бұрын

I think dictionaries try to keep up with the times, especially these years when online dictionaries can be updated easily to define new words and new meanings. "Trumpism" could make the online dictionaries in weeks, whereas printed dictionaries might not be updated for a decade or so. Curriculums are designed and used for years. I had the same algebra textbook as my mother did, thirty years before.

I am a non-native speaker of english, and picked up the british accent through youtube and sports commentary. I cannot believe the fact that I hear these differences and incorporate them all on my own. No one told me to do so, but my pea does end in a y sound. Perhaps it is because I was just 13 when I decided to learn the accent. I naturally do the vocal fry when I want to sound like a know-it-all too! It seems exposure and input does work. haha

@caretakerfochr3834

6 ай бұрын

Argh...vocal fry, the sound old people make when their voice is giving out. Somehow using fry is confused with wisdom or authority. Not a fan. At all.

@bradleybrown8428

6 ай бұрын

There isn't, a, british accent but that's really good :)

@arty9340

6 ай бұрын

@@bradleybrown8428 It's an estuary accent i picked up from F1 and the likes. Didn't wanna specify for whatever reason when I wrote that comment.

I finally get to have a reasoning for intrusive R: That’s a “hard break” for the previous long vowel. I finally understand why this is done, thank you, Dr. Geof!!!

Oh man. What high quality content. Me and my friends all talk online from different parts of the world and frequently try to do each other's accents for fun. I was vaguely aware of some of these vowel length differences before just by instinct, but you really nailed it down. This should help my impressions. I love all the variations of the English accents around the world, there are so many of them, and they are so fun to do for some reason.

This is eye-opening! I always figured the "r" sound in "law and order" was a hypercorrection and maybe a holdover from when british accents were rhotic. I never realized it was part of the dipthonguzation of English long vowels! I love learning about _why_ precisely accents sound different. We all hear it, but it is so difficult to pin down. In the same vein, most of my fellow Germans are unaware that their accents force them to start any initial vowel with a glottal stop. It is such a distinctive marker of the German accent in about any other language, and Germans more often than not are unable to hear it or to stop themselves from saying it. The same goes for the hardening of final consonants. Which reminds me of a Canadian friend whom I tried to teach to say an o-sound without the w. She couldn't hear the difference and even when I told her to say ooo and simply stop breathing midway she still couldn't help to add a little w.

@BoonBreyne

5 ай бұрын

I love this comment! Especially the glottal stop Germans do in front of a beginning vowel and the -w as part of an English accent ending -o adding on top of the particularities presented in the video. I feel like we should go ahead and analyse ALL the accents now hahaha. Like Italians not managing to end a word on a consonant, or whatever Germans do with English -r-. (Add a little a?)

How I wish Dr. Lindsey would enlighten us with more videos! I never knew linguistics could be so engaging!

"There was something interesting in the _pawn_ shop" gets me a stare from my American wife every time. I grew up in England and cannot hear the difference between the word I mean, and the word she hears, no matter how many times she patiently tries to teach me. This video gave me some clues!

@Bazroshan

6 ай бұрын

What does a pawnbroker do?

@johnpmchappell

6 ай бұрын

Pawn and porn are homophones for RP speakers, aye.

There's also "Warshington", which a wide variety of Americans say either regularly or occasionally, even though none of those dialects have intrusive r. My parents and I say Washington but my aunt says Warshington, and I sometimes hear my mom say Warshington and I told her once, "You said Warshington", and she said "I said Washington." All of us come from the West Coast where Washington is the norm. Later I noticed even myself saying Warshington occasionally. I don't know what it is about that one word, because it doesn't happen with other words. I guess the tongue position for r is between a and sh, so it's possible to go through it on the way, so people sometimes do.

@Woodman-Spare-that-tree

6 ай бұрын

Seems to me, as a Brit, that there isn’t one American accent. There are many. Same as in Britain there are many different local accents. If you come from London, England, for example, you will have a very different accent from someone who comes from Reading, England, and very different again from someone who comes from Taunton, England. Even though there’s only 100-150 miles in between. And East Londoners (if there are any genuine English people still living there who havent already left as part of White Flight), have a very different accent from West Londoners.

@randomperson6433

6 ай бұрын

I’m in Warshington. My great grandparents were from Missoura ;) They’d say “Warshington”. They also pronounced “dish” like “deesh”. It’s a quirk I don’t see anywhere else. Maybe it’s a generational thing too.

@anndeecosita3586

6 ай бұрын

@@randomperson6433A lot of people in Missouri say Missoura. Warsh for wash.

@jonmce1

5 ай бұрын

It is also the pronouciation I learned in southern Ontario.@@anndeecosita3586

I especially liked the formant analysis. Hard data that cannot be argued with! As for languages being allergic to adjacent vowels, my native German solves this by inserting a glottal stop. Only after moving to the UK did I realize that the English insert the intrusive R instead. It still sounds wrong to me, and I don’t think I will ever adopt it, but my daughter definitely uses it :) Edit: Ha, I should’ve finished watching before commenting, I see that the glottal stop is now appearing in this role in English as well.

One of my favorite examples of the linking R is in the dubs of old Godzilla movies, most of which were done in Hong Kong. Most of the actors use a rhotic accent that sounds vaguely American, but still use a linking R, so "Godzilla" comes out as "Godziller," which is just hilarious. _"GODZILLER!"_

@calebfuller4713

6 ай бұрын

So THAT'S how it became Godzilla! The original Japanese name was actually Gojira, which an English speaker would have no trouble with, but I guess the Hong Kong voice actors struggled with it.

I just love this mini collab with Matt Parker! So great when two KZreadrs I love work together.

@PC_Simo

6 ай бұрын

My thoughts, exactly 🎯😮👍🏻!

You are incredible at breaking down the differences in sound. I’ve often picked up on these elongated vowel sounds in British English versus American English, but I then found I would overcompensate and make them too long! Fascinating stuff here really!

A brilliant video as always, Dr Lindsey! I just wanted to say that I've just received your book from Amazon, and after reading it in a single setting, I've recognised all the topics that you've already dealt with in your videos; they certainly help me in understanding all the pronounciation differences between RP and SSB made in your book. Many thanks from Germany!

I'm so glad you brought up that part with 'an hour' & 'a unit!' I don't know how many times I've seen something to the effect of 'a hour' being defended because in so many examples from people I've spoken to in my life, it's always taught that the a/an difference is specifically for if the starting letter is a consonant or a vowel. no regard is seemingly ever given to if it's a consonant or a vowel SOUND at the start of the word. for example, my accent pronounces herb like erb, it will always be written as 'a herb,' but will always be read as 'an erb.' if I point this out to someone, they never noticed it before. there are some exceptions, though. like my mother. she has an erb cabinet, but will order herb chicken at a restaurant

@mikelward

6 ай бұрын

Some people still insist on writing "an historic". Might make sense if they have a cockney (or other London) accent, but I doubt that's what they're going for.

@athrun2

6 ай бұрын

@@mikelwardif someone's accent uses or drops the h on something, that makes sense to me. but writing it in a way that you don't speak it just comes across as a bit strange to me. if that's how one speaks, more power to you. but stuff writing 'a hour' & saying 'an hour' perplexes me.

@philroberts7238

6 ай бұрын

I remember being told at some stage in my childhood - which was indeed an historic era! - that it was related to the rhythmic "flow" of the word in question, leading to, for example "an historic", "an Harrovian", "an hotel" etc. I think it was something to do with the stress being on the second syllable of the following word. Even with the "h" being pronounced, there is more than a hint of the dreaded "hiatus" if the "n" isn't pronounced. I even seem to remember that super posh accents of the early 20th Century would drop the "h' altogether in these circumstances. (Similarly, in Dickensian times the young swells of the day might say "ain't" for "isn't' - or "amn't" - with no hint of pretending to be cockney or American.)

@williamcampbell9859

6 ай бұрын

@@philroberts7238 This might be the worst thing I've ever read. Gross

As a native, but heritage language speaker of kiwi English grown up in Scandinavia I've always tried to keep my accent free from Scandinavian influence, although since English is so widely spoken it's really tough. I often end up having the South African pronunciation type, especially in rapid speech and when there is no -r orthographically. I can imagine that the Afrikaans substrate could be the reason for South African English not having the same allergy to hiatus as RP and ANZAC-english have.

I always find these videos fascinating, but so completely different to my own east-central Scots accent - I don't do any of the things "British" English does, but despite my accent being absolutely nothing like any US accent, that's what's much more similar. The clip where "walk" is said to sound like "wok" is still longer than I would say "walk"! I never use a linking r, because I don't drop the r in the first place (and I use a glottal stop where necessary). I say "four o'clock" at exactly the same speed as two and three. "Father" and "gather" sound exactly the same when I say it, and I say "thought" exactly as short as Winona Ryder did. (Though I say "hair" with two syllables and a good strong r at the end!)

@aerialpunk

6 ай бұрын

I'm Canadian and think way too much about this stuff haha, and the other day I had this idea that Canadian and American accents maybe have drawn as much from Scottish and Irish accents as from British ones, maybe more so, cos I noticed similarities like the little things you mentioned. Though, I dunno if this is just a me thing or a Canada thing or what, but I do say father and four o'clock slightly longer. Not as long as the British guy did, but a tad longer than the American one anyway.

@lamudri

6 ай бұрын

I'm guessing that talking about the Scottish vowel length rule would have made the video significantly longer, because, in terms of interest, it's surely worth a mention. It'd be great to have a follow-up to compare, because my intuition is that there is a length difference between “two o'clock” and “four o'clock”, but not between “gather” and “father”.

In the 80's at a Dickens-era fair in the U.S., I was dressed as a jr officer in a Highland regiment & was approached by a Scot who'd served in that regiment & we spoke for a bit when he asked me where in England I was from- when I told him Los Angeles he was shocked and said "Ya sounded exactly like ma pommy officers in the regiment" - which made me super pleased. In 2019 two middle class women from London asked me the same question & were quite surprised by my reply - but I've also been told when I speak Japanese that I sound like I'm from Tokyo - I appear to be a 🦜 That said, I learn a lot from your videos to improve my British accent, so thanks Dr!

It's amazing how easily you move from one pronunciation/accent to the other. Thanks for sharing your expertise.

I notice that it's very difficult for American actors to adopt Australian accents in film. Your explanations make total sense! Thank you

As a Scot watching this, it's illuminating noticing the things that we share with English and Australian accents and what we share with American. I feel I say 'four' slower than an American, but, unlike many English or Australians we Scots tend to pronounce the r more distinctly. Meanwhile things like gather and father are identical in my accent as they are for Americans in the sound of the 'ather' part- and yet not like the Americans say it, the 'a' sound is like somewhere in between English and American 'gather'.

@TrueNativeScot

6 ай бұрын

That's due to a different phenomenon - the Scots Vowel Length Rule which causes vowels to lengthen before [r]

I have no idea how I ended up watching one of your videos a while back, but I enjoyed it so much that I've watched lots of them by now. The content of your channel is fantastic. Educational and fun! Found myself laughing out loud several times while watching this video. Love it!

This channel is phenomenal. Please don't stop making videos!

Fascinating and illuminating! I always had difficulties teaching linking sounds in respect of the vowel-consonant dichotomy of so-called approximants, and your noting the existence of a [j] present in the vowel of "pea" really opened my eyes. Regarding the 'r' in four-o'clock and length: I always agreed with Jan Haydn-Rowles & Edda Sharpe regarding rhoticity as best thought of as a colouring of a preceding vowel, so the 'r' in GenAm 'four' isn't an intrusive link as it might be in StdEng (ie where a non-rhotic speaker actually inserts an 'r' that they wouldn't usually pronounce in that word); or, to say that rhotic speakers FINISH syllables with 'r', but non-rhotic speakers BEGIN syllables with 'r', eg with the name 'Jerry' - rhotic speakers say "Jerr+y" and non-rhotic "Je+rry", which explains why, in Seinfeld, his friends will shorten his name to "Jerr", which would sound bizarre coming from most Brits. I'm glad you pointed out the increase of hard attack (I always think of JR Ewing, back in the day, [ðə ʔɔɪɫ bɪznɪs]. Lastly, amusing to hear Jake Gyllenhaal use [ɔ] in the word "lost", bringing to mind the hyper-RP of "Chairing Crawss" for "Charing Cross" 🙂

I appreciate your attention to transcriptional detail when you use /oːr/ for the sound in Southern British English. My accent of American English maintains a difference between /or/ (as in "four", "hoarse", "wore") versus /ɔr/ (as in "for", "horse", "war"). To my ears those are quite different sounds and require different symbols.

@toby9999

6 ай бұрын

To me, they're all the same. I grew up in New Zealand, so perhaps that's why. Some others I've noticed... I was taught "ear" "air" "hair" "here" and "hare" all have the same sound (sorry, I don't understand the symbols /or/ and /ɔr/). But I've notice since living in Australia they sound different e.g. "hair" and "here" has a different sound. Another one is "to" "two" and "too"... in NZ, they all sounded the same to me. At my primary school one year (circa 1972), I had a teacher from the UK who was teaching us to pronounce each differently. I would pronounce each identically, but I've noticed some people pronouncing them differently, especially "to" vs "too".

@AtomikNY

6 ай бұрын

@@toby9999 Yeah, there aren't many dialects that preserve the distinction between for/horse/war and four/hoarse/wore. As for to/two/too, the difference is mainly that "to" can be reduced to /tə/ while the other two are always pronounced /tʉw/. There used to be dialects that distinguished "two" by pronouncing the W (/twʉw/) but as far as I know that pronunciation is obsolete everywhere.

It's a pure pleasure listening to you, Dr. Lindsey! Thank you so much!

Your long video about English vowels was the first one I watched and I'm hooked ever since! You're doing great work!

I was extremely proud to see I knew all the information you said. This video is awesomely done, 16 min long only and a beautiful melting-pot of some of the most important and interesting points you've dispatched into other, more specialised videos. Amazing job, fascinating as always; as someone whose first language isn't english, your work has been a huge help and has opened my eyes to linguistics, seemingly a very niche subject that's yet all around us constantly! Thank you ' v'

Your point about the relative length of American vowels is well-taken. But now I'm wondering about the case of the classic American intervocalic flap, putting [ɾ] where [d] or [t] would otherwise be. The flap renders words like _latter_ and _ladder_ phonetically identical except for the length of the vowel: [læɾɚ] and [læːɾɚ] respectively. At least, that's what I remember my linguistics professors teaching us. Is that all in our heads? I swear I perceive a slight length difference between _latter_ and _ladder_ but as with the whole _can_ and _can't_ phenomenon, it's possible it's all just in my head.

@razzle1964

6 ай бұрын

I never had a ‘linguistics professor’ (heck, I never had ANY professor) but, with my English ear, I felt the difference was in the ‘rounding of the r’ in ‘ladder’. In ‘latter’, the ‘rounding’ at the end not so much, if at all. (apols for poor explanation).

11:56 I love love love Simon Whistler! Such a beautiful delivery in all of his channels!

Fascinating study as ever. Thank you so much.

Very interesting video, you set the high standards of linguistics with modern tools of precise computational analysis once again !

As an American, I find myself pronouncing the vowel sound of pea as one single vowel sound, rather than pɪj, which sounds noticeably British to my ears when I pronounce it on purpose. I would be interested to see your analysis of the American pronunciation!

Watching the vid and reading the comment is fascinating. As a nonnative, I grew up learning English by watching youtube, but I first started with American-accent video tape for the listening part in English books, while the vlogs and shows I watched were mostly from the UK, or Australia. And I kept switching between those "accent" when I imitated people, which is fun in the first place and frustrating later on because... for example, at school I got questioned because my teacher thought I pronounced a word incorrectly, then I had to explain I got it from the early days of learning English, or maybe from a vlog I watched. What I love about all of this difference is when I watch films set in some particular places such as Texas, or Yorkshire, or Dublin or somewhere in Scotland. I love every accent, and after a while I gave up on the idea of trying to imitate one accent as well, because my mother tongue is tonal and switching from that to English, my mouth gets tired pretty quickly and then I can sound very accent-ish, as if I add tones to English

Your edits are hilarious! I thoroughly enjoyed this video, it's great being able to explain exactly what it is about the American/British/Australian accent swapping that gives it away as inauthentic.

Interesting and well explained, as usual! And it feels surreal to hear Matt Parker's jingle pop out of nowhere.

@PC_Simo

6 ай бұрын

Same feeling here, mate 😅.

I'd love to hear your analysis of the speech of Okracoke Island in North Carolina and Tangier Island in Virginia. It's said that people native to these two places sound distinctly British, but in different ways.

No one ever gets the Australian accent right except Australians! Even Merryl Streep😂 Then try Australian First Nation accent from remote rural areas! Many Aussies don’t even know it exists but it’s seriously the most beautiful accent in the world. The tones and rolling sound of it gets me in the heart every time. Strangely, the one White person I’ve ever heard speak in it naturally is anglo Australian musician CW Stoneking. But he grew up in remote rural Australian with First Nation kids and community apparently, with his primary school teacher parents! It blew me away when he came out with that accent and voice in a concert that I went too. I could have been out in community, out in the desert! It’s not a common accent in our cities or media and never amongst white people, no matter where that come from here, even rural. It’s beautiful though. The cultures are too. They deserve a lot more respect here than what they get too, sadly. Also that Macquarie University lecturer has a distinctively Italian Australian accent! Or possibly Greek Australian. I don’t know anyone who speaks like that except lots of my Italian or Greek heritage Aussie friends! They call it a Woggy accent but you only use that word if you ARE that. You don’t say if it you’re not actually that heritage! (But it’s not necessarily like the N word so it’s ok that I type it. Or it has been for decades, but always happy to be corrected if times have changed and I shouldn’t type it now!). His accent though is very much definitely from those communities here too. Not from Anglo Australian communities! Even if he’s integrated totally in the rest of his life. So interesting!

@damien678

6 ай бұрын

I'm Australian and I barely get it right 😂

I'm really glad I subscribed a few months ago. This was the first time one of your videos literally had be go 'aha!' It's exciting to learn something new, especially when I wasn't expecting it to excite me this much

As a hobby phonologist, I greatly value your analyses. It often surprises me, how "official sources" give insufficient or even wrong information about phonological questions. Thanks for your great content!

Oh my goodness, Matt Parker!

I found this video fascinating and so much fun !!! Australian speech pathology student from regional Victoria and moved to Perth and lived there in a suburb predominantly English, just moved to New Jersey, married to a sth African whose mother is Dutch. I just loved all of this !

Great video as always Dr Lindesy. Even as a non-native speaker of English who lives in CA, I can definitely hear these nuances once they are explained to me.

I'm an American teacher of English who really gets into pronunciation with my students. What I've found is that vowel length has nothing to do with the identity of the vowel, but by its place in a word or sentence. "Buck" has a short "uh" sound, and "bug" has a long "uh" sound, because of the unvoiced / voiced final consonants. I'm kind of stuck with the traditional categories of "long" and "short" a, e, i, o, and u, but I know perfectly well that ā is not necessarily longer than ă; ē is not necessarily longer than ĕ, and so on. I try to refer to them as "alphabet vowels" (because the "long" ones say their alphabet names) and "simple vowels" (because the "short" vowels are just 1 sound, not 2 or 3 together).

@goombacraft

6 ай бұрын

Yep, it's called Clipping. Geoff talks about it in his "Why these English phonetic symbols are all WRONG" video at 15:33. kzread.info/dash/bejne/maiizqmBYJibhKQ.htmlsi=Zc-405lX2yIq9uSw&t=933

@Zzyzzyx

6 ай бұрын

@@goombacraft thanks!

@Zzyzzyx

6 ай бұрын

​@@goombacraftThat's one reason I don't use IPA with my students. I don't think it's accurate. (There are other reasons too.)

@TheEternalVortex42

6 ай бұрын

Hmm, I pronounce "buck" and "bug" with the same vowel length.

@Zzyzzyx

6 ай бұрын

@@TheEternalVortex42 Then I would probably hear "buck" both times.

5:29 probably the most savage way for a linguist to prove their point, keep slaying

Dr. Lindsey, I absolutely love your videos. I gave up teaching EFL a long time ago now but just before I did, I helped a few students with their pronunciation using Collins Work on Your Accent. It ended up being a bit of a nightmare as we reached the end of the book because of these inaccuracies you talk about in your videos. I've asked before but it may have got lost in the comments: would you ever help produce a book like Work On Your Accent but with the reworked symbols and more accurate descriptions of SSBE? I ask because I would buy that in a heartbeat! Keep the videos coming. They're absolutely brilliant and fascinating! Thank you!

I love that you had a cameo by Matt Parker going over your data! Two great channels!

I had a good chuckle at the south african bits.... would be nice if you did more videos on us

@razzle_dazzle

6 ай бұрын

That accent is so interesting and doesn't get enough attention!

Dr. Lindsey have you ever heard of or looked into the Newfoundland english accent? Its a very unique accent with close ties to Irish and British accents. Would love to see your thoughts on it in a video some day.

@JuandeFucaU

6 ай бұрын

Newfies don't have an accent..... it's a speech impediment. zing!

@Allan_son

6 ай бұрын

The initial test will be an approximately correct version of the island's name? (I am a Maritimer, we get close enough that we don't annoy Newfoundlanders.)

@Allan_son

6 ай бұрын

"British" is a bit vague. I think Newfoundland is a mix of Irish and some very specific English accents; south west maybe? It long predates RP, I am pretty sure.

@Vinlander95

6 ай бұрын

@@Allan_son Yes true enough. I'm a Newfoundlander myself, so I used "British" as a catch-all term since many early Newfoundlanders came from various parts of Britain, so there were a variety of accents - some Scottish families for example, though not many. But you're right in that the majority of Newfoundlanders who immigrated from Britain came from the south-west of England.

This was so interesting, and very clearly explained! Thank you

Love this. Like seeing spectrogram analysis. Can't beat the good ole formants

A brilliant example of this is the way that a New Yorker in the film ‘Raging Bull’ says the word ‘ball’ twice in quick succession, each time sounding exactly like the word ‘bull’ due to the lack of a vowel length distinction, at least to my British ears. Ironic considering the film title but I was surprised that this speaker, with a broad NY accent, didn’t go for the more typical ‘baw-ul’ with a long and diphthongal vowel instead!

Dr. Lindsey thank you for this realization! I was always puzzled that words in other languages ending in /ij/ sounded suspiciously like my own American /i:/. Turns out I've been saying /ij/ this whole time! Elegant explanation as always.

Nice to hear the explanation of the trailing r sound. Very interesting.

Nice surprise with the Matt Parker feature there :) I've since landed on a selection of channels that all seem to be connected in some way or another. Sure feels homely.

Not everyday your channel gets personally called out by Dr Lindsey for teaching ‘nonsense’😂. Definite food for thought though regarding intrusion. Made me realize I’ve been teaching something (from my TESOL and Cambridge Delta) that is not really true. I shall reflect on this. Thanks for your videos Dr Lindsey.

@Liam-qr7zn

6 ай бұрын

*every day 'Everyday' is an adjective.

As an Australian who grew up partly in South Africa, I am very comfortable with a hiatus and I don’t speak with the “linking r”. This is the case even though my hybrid accent is arguably more Australia than anything else (some Australians might disagree on the latter, but they would be incorrect: no South African would confuse me for one of their own). So I can now identify one of the surviving South African elements of my accent.

@violjohn

6 ай бұрын

I was told very firmly never to use a linking r, that it was “low”. So it’s law wand order for me ( Cape Town)

@DanDjurdjevicplus

6 ай бұрын

@@violjohn yes, during my formative years in South Africa, a linking “r” was indeed regarded as “low”!

Keanu is Canadian. So, I'm not sure if that messes with the assertions. ;) I noticed that in Barbie, ostensibly a very American film, 2/3 of the core actors are Canadian, British or Australian.

Definitely didn't expect Matt Parker to show up on this channel, but I love it!

Appalachian accents are a little different--we have an accent on personal names that is pretty distinct. For names that end with an "-a", the "-a" is dropped and becomes "-er" (e.g., Ader instead of Ada). If the name ends in "-ra", the "a" is dropped and the "er" becomes elided to a long r. "Laura" (Lawra) then becomes "Lawrr". This seems similar to linking R, but completely independent of any vowel or consonant sound following it.

@ikbintom

6 ай бұрын

Only names, or also other words? Like opera - operr? Coma - comer?

@anndeecosita3586

6 ай бұрын

Speaking of words like laurel, laura. I tend to day law ra, law rel but a lot of other Americans say lo rel and lo ra. I didn’t notice until someone pointed it out to me. I think it’s because my family is from a town called laurel and everyone there pronounces it the way I do.

@Krzyszczynski

6 ай бұрын

That being so, how do the words "horror" and "terror" come out?

As an Australian who's learning Dutch, it doesn't surprise me that the South African accent doesn't have much trouble with hiatus. To my ear a lot of Dutch sounds end very abruptly, which I struggle to replicate.

You, sir, are a font of valuable and interesting information. Thank you for the time and effort you put into this video and many others like it.

I love these videos and learn so much from you! Please keep them coming :D

As an Australian English speaker, I don't say "lore and order", but I might be outnumbered here. I feel like because "law" already ends in a consonant, I naturally just add the "w" back in, instead of an "r" which sounds... well, intrusive.

@clerigocarriedo

6 ай бұрын

"Law" does not finish in a consonant.

Geoff, please make a breakdown on Scottish and Irish accents! I think those are two hardest accents to understand, but they have their own logic.

I learn so much every time I watch your videos. Thank you very much!

I studied English Linguistics, and I LOVE this video! Very detailed observations, thank you so much for this! Definitely gonna watch more!

Excellent video. In American English other than General American, I think that at least some Appalachian speakers (who are rhotic) pronounce "four" with two syllables as "fower," and it seems like this would come as a way of preserving vowel length. Thus, "fower o'clock" would have a longer duration than "two o'clock."

@anndeecosita3586

6 ай бұрын

True. In some Southern US accents including Appalachian, they tend to make one syllable words into two. Another example is Hell sounds like he yel.

geoff! something i've really noticed in my fellow young, southern, english speakers recently is 'gunnoo' as a contraction of 'going to'. i don't know whether i've only just started picking up on this contraction recently or whether it's a newer thing, but i'm curious as to whether this is shift that's occurring away from 'gonna'? or does gunnoo occur more in sentences where the 'to' for emphasis (i.e., 'i was gunnoo' sounds better to me than 'i was gonna' as contractions for 'i was going to', in a hypothetical situation where the verb is assumed from a previous sentence of another speaker). would love your thoughts? it's like the 'oo' of the 'to' is slipping back in!

@bradparker5213

6 ай бұрын

Great observation! I'm from Australia (Victoria) and do this too.

@nerdpantsandme

6 ай бұрын

American from Massachusetts here, and we do that in certain situations. There's also "wannoo" instead of "wanna" for "want to". I think little kids can use it for emphasis like your "I was gunnoo" example, mostly happening at the end of the sentence, but adults tend to stick with "going to" or "gunna". However, kids and adults alike will put it in front of vowels like "Are you gunnoo eat that?" or "my guy's gunnoo attack your guy".

I learn so much from these videos. From this one, I learned something extremely basic that I somehow never realized before: Long vowels are called "long" because they are literally held for a longer period of time, and conversely short vowels are called "short" for the opposite reason. I learned about long vowel sounds and short vowel sounds way back in elementary school, but I thought that "long" and "short" were just arbitrary terms that didn't really mean much -- I never understood that these terms were literal! I also gained an interesting perspective on the British and Australian "linking r." Even though I know that Brits and Aussies don't pronounce many "r"s that we Americans do pronounce (e.g., in the words "car" or "start"), I had always perceived that the "ghost" of the "r" is still there in Brit or Aussie pronunciation. What I mean is that I perceive that the "r" still colors the preceding vowel sound, and thus is there by implication, even if the "r" itself isn't explicitly pronounced. But the explanation at 13:42 presents a very different perspective on this, which has given me food for thought.

I really liked the use of reversal to verify the actual sounds produced. I'm curious if is more broadly applicable, or is specific to certain sound combinations?